Review: Messiah (DNF)

Title: Messiah

Author: Gore Vidal

Genre: Classic/Satire

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia (mentions), internalized acephobia, death (mentions), suicidal ideation/suicide/death viewed as a desireable thing, alcohol use (mentions), car crash (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read to: DNF on page 136

Back Cover:

When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal’s deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

Review:

I really thought a book about a guy supporting the founder of a modern death cult would be good. I thought at least it would be interesting. I like reading books with excessive details about fictional religions, and the more weird, oddball, and cult-like the fictional religion, the better. I was excited about this book!

Yet somehow, this book about a modern suicide/death cult that becomes the biggest religion in the world was just dull. I got almost exactly halfway through it (136 pages out of 275 in my edition) waiting for it to pick up, and it never did. When I stopped, the promised TV appearance had just happened. Most of the story has been setup and backstory, but not about the mortician-prophet John Cave and his philosophy, or even what was going on in the world that would make the majority of people accept a death cult as the primary religion. Instead, it was about Eugene’s struggle to write a biography of Julian, the parties he went to and the people he talked to there, how the machinations of one acquaintance brought him into contact with John Cave, and his general skepticism about the whole thing.

And now a moment for some not-really-relevant character notes I think are worth mentioning: One side character claims to be over two thousand years old and nobody seems to think of that as anything more than a dubiously-plausible, but not impossible, oddity. It was a discordant magical-realism element in an otherwise classic-contemporary-satire story. Also, Eugene is on-page what we today would call asexual – explicitly not interested in sex, but still experiencing romantic attraction to women. Unfortunately, he views this as something “broken” about his ability to have relationships.

There’s also a secondary story set in the future. This book is written as Eugene, the protagonist, telling the story of how he met John Cave and helped him found his new religion, interspersed with snippets of his life as he is writing the story. But both are unfortunately dull. The future sections make it clear that Eugene had some kind of major split from the new religion of Cavesword and has spent several decades living in Egypt, where the Muslims work hard to keep the Cavite religion from entering. But that section was even less interesting, as Eugene is now an old man and spends most of his time tottering around his apartment and by turns talking with and avoiding a Cavite missionary recently arrived in the country.

There were a couple of reasons I think I struggled with this story. One is not at all the story’s fault – the edition I read appears to be from some kind of small independent press, which lead to a lot of small but annoying errors like missing closing quotations, missing periods at the end of sentences, and the occasional “I” replaced with “1”. A second reason is that the book was published nearly seventy years ago, and the style is definitely an older, denser, slower style than I’m used to – which is not necessarily a bad thing, but added an additional layer of distance to a narrative I was already struggling with. A third is that the story doesn’t write down anything John Cave actually says – there are scenes of him speaking, but the scene and mood of the audience is described in lieu of any actual words, and his ideas are filtered through others before being passed on to the reader. This guy is described as a hypnotic public speaker, a guy who can convince everyone he talks to that being dead is better than being alive, and yet his persuasive powers are filtered entirely through other people.

But I think the biggest issue was that the protagonist lacked passion. It’s told in first-person, and yet there wasn’t a single thing that made Eugene feel an emotion. I can understand being skeptical or disillusioned, but there was no feeling behind it. When John Cave spoke and what he said thrilled everybody, Eugene says that it is mesmerizing without ever seeming mesmerized himself. The story covered both before he got really involved in Cavesword and after he had his falling-out with it, and it’s clear that he got deeply involved at one point, but neither narration indicates that he was anything more than a bored observer who drifted in because his close acquaintances were involved and then drifted back out again. As someone who has left a religion I wholeheartedly believed and was deeply involved in, I didn’t get the sense even from the future narration that Eugene was ever much more than a moderately disinterested but useful observer to this forming cult.

The ideas here were good, but the story felt flat and lifeless to me. I think the idea of a death cult becoming the dominant global religion is fascinating. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief that everyone would buy that immediately, so I think there needs to be some more societal context there. I also think it would have been better with a more dynamic, passionate protagonist, or at least a protagonist who felt like he actually believed in the new religion’s teachings. Or it could just be that I’m not very experienced with reading satire and I’m totally missing everything. Regardless, I don’t find it interesting enough to continue.

Review: The Analects of Confucius

Title: The Analects

Author: Confucius

Genre: Classic/Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), animal death (mentions)

Back Cover:

One of the undisputed giants in the history of human thought, and the founder of one of the world’s longest-lasting cultural traditions, Confucius (known as Kong Fuzi in his native China) is arguably the most enduring of all the world’s great thinkers. The Analects, the slender volume thought to have been compiled by his followers, has the strongest claim to represent Confucius’ actual words. Sometimes pithy, sometimes conversational, occasionally enigmatic, often profoundly searching, the book contains memorable sayings about the moral health of the individual, the family and the body politic, and continues to be a source of inexhaustible wisdom after more than two and a half millennia.

Review:

This isn’t a review in the strictest sense. I’m just a white American twenty-something who reads too much – I don’t think I get to pass judgment on a book that’s been a cultural cornerstone for billions of people since the 300s BCE. However, I do have some thoughts on my experience of reading it, so that’s what this is.

Reading the Analects was a very similar experience to reading The Art of War – I could tell that this was full of great wisdom, but without context, a teacher, and many hours of study, all but the most obvious advice seemed beyond my grasp. However, this time I had the foresight to find a 12-hour lecture series about the Analects to listen to after reading the book. And I have to say, reading 2000+-year-old Eastern wisdom directly followed by listening to a professor of ancient Chinese history and philosophy explain it for 12 hours is the way to go. I’m tempted to reread The Art of War just so I can follow it up with a lecture series and comprehend it better.

Anyway. I frequently hear Confucianism classified as a religion, but after reading the Analects (and having a professor of ancient Chinese history and philosophy explain them to me), it’s an odd classification for a Western understanding of “religion.” Confucius as presented here isn’t concerned about deities or spirits or anything supernatural at all. The Analects is purely about how to live with the goal of becoming an “exemplary man” whose conduct is beyond reproach. This mostly involves filial piety (respect and subservience to parents, and to a lesser extent older siblings), dedicated and disciplined devotion to learning, and strict observance of ritual.

I have a hard time getting behind Confucian ideas of filial piety. I get respecting your parents, but I don’t get the eternal and complete submission to them that Confucius seems to be advocating, and I really don’t get letting older siblings have some control over your life by virtue of being older. I think I need more than 12 hours of lectures for my modern Western sensibilities to really grasp that one.

Devotion to learning, though, I can really get behind. Listening to hours and hours of content about how much Confucius valued learning and study made me want to go back to school and get a Master’s degree. I also appreciated his emphasis on the value of ritual. I’ve somehow gained even more appreciation for ritual since leaving religion and I appreciate the value that Confucius ascribes to it (which mainly seems to be community cohesiveness and respect for tradition).

There are a lot of things to appreciate in the Analects. They have great historical value, they give insight into politics and culture at the time they were written, they have influenced East Asia strongly for literally thousands of years, and much of their focus on right living is still applicable to the modern day. None of the individual sayings are particularly long, and they feel a bit like they’re intentionally bite-sized to make it easier to puzzle over each.

And there’s definitely plenty to puzzle over. Some sayings are easy to comprehend, others I would not have figured out without the lecture series explaining the historical and cultural context that gives it meaning. I recommend reading the Analects, but if you have the opportunity to read them and then have someone spend several hours explaining the intricacies to you, that’s the way to do it.

Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

Genre: Classic/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of children, mental illness, murder, war, sexual content, adult/minor relationship, infidelity, incest, body horror, religious bigotry, rape

Back Cover:

Gabriel García Márquez’s finest and most famous work, the Nobel Prize-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles, through the course of a century, life in Macondo and the lives of six Buendía generations-from José Arcadio and Úrsula, through their son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (who commands numerous revolutions and fathers eighteen additional Aurelianos), through three additional José Arcadios, through Remedios the Beauty and Renata Remedios, to the final Aureliano, child of an incestuous union. As babies are born and the world’s “great inventions” are introduced into Macondo, the village grows and becomes more and more subject to the workings of the outside world, to its politics and progress, and to history itself. And the Buendías and their fellow Macondons advance in years, experience, and wealth . . . until madness, corruption, and death enter their homes.

Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel weaves a magical tapestry of the everyday and the fantastic, the humdrum and the miraculous, life and death, tragedy and comedy—a tapestry in which the noble, the ridiculous, the beautiful, and the tawdry all contribute to an astounding vision of human life and death, a full measure of humankind’s inescapable potential and reality.

Review:

I mainly picked this up because I put it on hold at the library during a (very brief) classics-reading kick earlier this year and promptly forgot about it. When it came available, I figured I might as well read it.

This story chronicles six-ish generations of the Buendía family and the small town of Macondo. Family heads José Arcadio and Úrsula, along with a group of unrelated other people, take a long trek into the jungle and build a town. Their family grows, their children have children of their own, and the Buendía family gets bigger – in number, in wealth, in stature in the town. Times change, war happens, the town becomes less isolated, new scientific inventions happen, the family begins to disperse away from the town. The town of Macondo rises, and then falls, with the Buendía family.

This is a weird book, but from my limited experience with magical realism, this is weird in ways consistent with the genre. It’s like the real world, but a little to the left. Alchemy is a thing that works, there’s a side character who may be immortal or may be already dead, one character gets medical treatment from psychic doctors who are thousands of miles away, a character gets taken up into heaven, and nobody views this as at all out of the ordinary. In fact, magnifying glasses and turning metal into gold are treated with equal seriousness and excitement, like the ability to put the right ingredients into a pot and turn them into gold is a neat scientific advancement like curving glass to make things bigger.

The thing that surprised me the most about this book is that for all its century-spanning scale and magical realism bizarreness, it’s remarkably human. None of these characters are great people, but they’re all doing their best in their circumstances. I found something relatable in every character – in Úrsula’s resourcefulness in keeping the family functional; in José Arcadio’s desire to learn all about cool new things; in Fernanda’s rigid adherence to rules; in Amaranta Úrsula’s desire to leave the small town where she grew up and grow in the wider world; in Remedios the Beauty’s … well, let’s be honest, Remedios the Beauty was who I wish I could be. There are six generations of Buendías, each of whom love and lose, grow and die, succeed, fail, make mistakes, and ultimately just are in all their messy glory. It sounds pretentious to say this book is about the human condition, but it kind of is.

My biggest struggle was keeping the characters straight. Normally I would blame this on the audiobook format, and it is what caused my difficulty remembering Arcadio and Aureliano were two different characters. But the book itself doesn’t make it easy on me, either. This family reuses names a lot – there are three José Arcadios (and one just Arcadio), three Remedioses, and twenty-two Aurelianos (although to be fair, only four of them actually have major roles). There are also 32 biological relatives and 8 spouses stretching across the century this book covers, not to mention characters who aren’t part of the Buendía family. At some point, I felt like I needed to give them numbers to tell them apart.

I didn’t think I was much for the “sweeping family saga” type of book, but if they’re anything like this, I may have to reconsider. I didn’t get particularly attached to any one character (unless you count Remedios the Beauty, who I mainly loved because she’s #goals), but I enjoyed seeing the high-level view of the rise and fall, fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendías. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, much to my surprise, an enjoyable and remarkably relatable book.

Review: The Master and Margarita

Title: The Master and Margarita

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

Genre: Classic/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, gore, forced institutionalization, nudity, infidelity, body horror, gun violence, fire, animal cruelty (kinda?), mental illness, cancer (mentions)

Back Cover:

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of in exhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth.

Review:

Ever since I read Vita Nostra I’ve been chasing that high, looking for another book that’s a similar combination of incomprehensible and enthralling – or even a book that’s equally enthralling as that masterpiece. I picked up this book because I hoped that maybe another Russian novel about Satan’s hijinks in Moscow would be what I’ve been searching for.

It really wasn’t. It was well-written, to be sure, and interesting enough to finish, but it didn’t hold a candle to Vita Nostra. I’m not entirely sure anything will.

There isn’t a main cast in this story, unless you count Woland (the alias Satan took for his time in Moscow) and his entourage. The story follows many different characters showing all the different ways Woland and company mess with the people Moscow – usually by getting them arrested or sent to an insane asylum. It’s not entirely clear to me if Woland has a reason for being there or if he’s just there to cause chaos. I did enjoy his companions, especially the cat. They were all unique, well-drawn, and entertaining personalities.

This book wasn’t published in the author’s lifetime because the censors didn’t like its portrayal of life under the Stalinist regime. I don’t know enough about Russia, Russian culture and attitudes, and what Russia was like under Stalin to pick up on any of that. In fact, I felt like I didn’t really pick up on anything this book was trying to say. It’s one of those where I wish I had an English teacher telling me what I’m supposed to be seeing, like those magic eye pictures where it’s easier to find the hidden image if someone tells me what I’m looking for.

The plot itself is fairly comprehensible on a surface level. (The hardest part was keeping track of the names, because many of the characters had nicknames that did not at all relate to their names. There were several times where I was confused at the introduction of a new character only to realize later that I’d already met him under a different name.) I understood the what, but not the why. I can tell that there’s some other layer of meaning behind Woland tormenting Moscow, the story of the Master and his lover Margarita, and whatever Pontius Pilate had to do with anything, but I couldn’t figure out what. It was a good story, but I finished it feeling like I’d figured out what it was about but was completely missed what it means.

I enjoyed the story for itself. Once I figured out that the guy the story started with was not the actual protagonist, it was a lot of fun. But I wish I had read this in an English class or with a friend who was really into Russian literature or something, because there’s a lot more underneath the surface here that I just can’t grasp.

Review: Utopia

Title: Utopia

Author: Thomas More

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Sexism, war (mentions), death (mentions), racism (mild), colonization, physical abuse, slavery, ableism, classism, adultism

Back Cover:

In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I of Utopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty, crime, injustice, and other ills do not exist. Locating his island in the New World, More bestowed it with everything to support a perfectly organized and happy people.

The name of this fictitious place, Utopia, coined by More, passed into general usage and has been applied to all such ideal fictions, fantasies, and blueprints for the future, including works by Rabelais, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, and several by H. G. Wells, including his A Modern Utopia.

Review:

This isn’t anything that a modern reader would consider a novel. There is no plot, no structure, and no characters unless you count the frame story from part one. This is, in essence, a description of what Thomas More thinks a perfect society should be, framed as a monologue from a traveler named Rafael telling Thomas about such a society. (Yes, the author put himself as himself into the novel – although I don’t think that was as unusual in 1516 as it is now.)

The word “utopia” has come from this book to mean a perfect society, but the Utopia in this book is not any place I’d want to live. To my modern sensibilities, it sounds more like a Puritan hellscape than anything. (Or proto-Puritan, I suppose, since the Puritan movement didn’t officially form until the 1560s.)

A few highlights:

• All people are perfectly equal, except that old men are served by everyone, women serve men, and children serve adults.
• Everyone wears the exact same clothing, which is shapeless and the color of undyed wool. Jewelry and decoration of any kind are considered childish.
• Families with too many children have some of them taken away and given to families that have too few.
• All religions are tolerated as long as they’re an acceptable form of Christianity, and not believing in the right things is punishable by slavery. (The Utopians were not Christian before Rafael showed up to their island, but of course they gladly converted when he told them about Jesus.)
• Twice a month, women and children have to kneel before their husband/father and confess everything they’ve done wrong.
• Potential spouses are presented to each other naked before agreeing to marry because “you wouldn’t buy a horse without examining it fully to check for defects, so why would you marry a wife when all you’ve seen is her face and hands?”
• Work is done efficiently so everyone has plenty of leisure time to spend in self-improvement. The only allowed leisure activities are reading and playing games like chess that improve your mind.

That said, there are some ideas from this society that I do like. One of the foundational ideas is what modern theory would call post-scarcity: if everyone stopped worrying about accumulating wealth and we got rid of all the societal roles (like nobility) that don’t produce anything useful, there would be more than enough. Nobody would have to bother with anything like money or hoarding wealth or goods, because why bother taking 18 bolts of cloth and stuffing them into your home when you can just take the one that you need now and get another one when you need it? I also like the idea of rotating who had to work on the farms outside the city and who lived in the city and giving everyone a chance to try any trade they wanted before deciding on one to make sure nobody got stuck with work they hated.

This book is definitely the product of its time. There was a conversation full of political commentary before the monologue started, and I definitely didn’t grasp the full nuance of it (likely due to never having lived in a monarchy). I’m sure many of the aspects of Utopia were meant to bring attention to specific social issues in 1516 – possibly relating to war since there was a heavy emphasis on “the Utopians hate war but if they have to here’s how they do it” – but I don’t know enough about the historical context to grasp what Thomas was trying to say. It was definitely an interesting book, but I think knowing the social and historical context it was written in would make it feel like something more than “here’s how Puritans think the world should be.”

Review: The Great Gatsby

Title: The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Antisemitism (subtext, not explicit), racism/Nazi ideology, car crash, alcohol use, blood, death, gore (brief), infidelity, gun violence

Back Cover:

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. This exemplary novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story is of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his new love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

Review:

I read this for the first time in high school and absolutely hated it. Loathed it, in fact. I remember it most vividly for having to write a paper about the motif of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg without understanding what a motif even was. There was no plot, the characters were all awful people, my fundamentalist Christian sensibilities were put off by all the infidelity, and I didn’t understand why anyone wanted to read to the end, let alone liked it enough to call it a classic.

But my husband considers it one of his favorite books, and ever since I read The Chosen and the Beautiful and didn’t hate it, he’s been suggesting that I give this one another chance. I agreed, mainly because the audiobook was short and immediately available at the library.

This time around, I didn’t hate it. I can’t say that I particularly liked it, but at least now I can see why it became a classic (and why my husband loves it so much).

This book is deceptively short for how complex it is. If you read it on the surface (which is how I read it in high school because I didn’t know any other way to read), it’s a boring story of rich people being rich and bored and having affairs and throwing ridiculous parties. It’s also a rare example of the narrator and the protagonist being different characters – Nick Caraway narrates the story, but his role is an observer to what happens to the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, and I did not know what to do with that in high school.

The Great Gatsby, like every classic book I’ve read, has Important Themes. Its main theme is that you can’t recapture, relive, or undo the past – you just have to grieve what you’ve lost and move on, or trying to bring back the past will destroy you and probably other people as well. Jay Gatsby loved Daisy, but he went off to fight in World War I and Daisy married someone else instead. Gatsby’s whole motivation is to get Daisy back, to bring back what they had when she was a rich teenager and he was a penniless young soldier but they were deeply in love, and to convince, gaslight, or force her feelings to be the same as his. Which to me says that he doesn’t love her as a person now, if he ever did, he just sees her as an object of his desire that he can possess, just like all the fancy things in his house.

There are also a lot of poignant, quotable lines in this book, several of which I’ve heard before without knowing they were from this book.

As far as entertainment goes, I did not enjoy this book. There’s no plot, the characters are all horrible people, and from a story perspective I found it pretty boring. But it does have some things of value to say theme-wise, so at least now I understand why it became a classic – even if I still don’t like it as much as my husband does.

Review: Galapagos (DNF)

Title: Galapagos

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Genre: Classic/Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, divorce, blood (mentions), cancer, murder, incest (mentions), child sexual abuse/pedophilia, whorephobia/slut-shaming

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 63%

Back Cover:

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry—and all that is worth saving.

Review:

I actually got pretty far though this one. It was definitely weird, but very creative and for a while I was curious about what happened. But then it got repetitive.

This book has a main cast of characters, and what I’m calling “Plot A” for convenience is set in a hotel in Ecuador, narrated by an unnamed person who might be from the future or immortal or dead or all three – it’s up to you to put together the pieces about them. Many of the characters end up dead before the end, which the narrator makes sure to announce early on. Since the narrator is either way in the future or possibly outside of time, there is very little linear structure to the way the story is told. It flips though our main cast in Ecuador, their pasts, their futures, tangents about a few minor characters, and humanity a million years after the 1980s when Plot A is set.

And it actually kind of worked. It was weird jumping between Plot A in 1980s Ecuador during a global economic collapse, each of the characters’ pasts that brought them there, their futures (mainly who they had children with and how they died), and bits of how humanity functions a million years on. The narrator kept stressing that these people at the hotel – including a widow, a con man, a Japanese couple, a millionaire and his daughter, a ship’s captain whose rank was purely decorative, and six native Ecuadorian girls recently escaped from their pimp – were the ancestors of the entire human race, and I was very curious about what happened to the rest of the world.

And then nothing ever progressed. We got characters’ backstories, sure, and brief vignettes about their life after whatever was going to happen happened, little hints and mentions of what did happen and what humans evolved into a million years later. But mostly it was about the Big Important Point of the book – that human evolution has made human brains so big that they can do stupid and counterproductive things like lie, and invent deadly weapons, and cause economic collapse by stopping believing in the value of currency, and make you feel suicidal, and other such things that could get in the way of popping out babies to continue the species which is the entire point of everything.

On one hand, it’s both accurate and an interesting philosophical idea. Human brains can malfunction in many weird ways that harm our individual survival (I say this as an owner of a somewhat malfunctioning brain myself), we do believe in a lot of imaginary things like currency and gender roles, and reproduction is the entire goal of evolution. However, after a while the narrator harping on this idea got obnoxious. Every time anyone did anything that wasn’t strictly about survival or reproduction, the narrator would go on about how their big brain made them do it and aren’t we glad our brains evolved to be smaller in the future? It also focused a lot on reproductive activity and how exactly our main cast’s genes went on to become the new, smaller-brained version of humanity. Which got a little uncomfortable at times because the native Ecuadorian girls were all minors during Plot A.

It’s not a bad idea, really. I quite enjoyed it for a while. But eventually it got old and I got annoyed. I think this would have worked much better as a short story or a novella to cut out all the repetition that annoyed me. But in its current form, 63% is about all I care to read.

Review: Fahrenheit 451

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Classic/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Fire, fire injury, death, suicide attempt, murder, needles (mentions)

Back Cover:

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television ‘family’. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Review:

I read this book in high school, but I remembered literally nothing about it – to the point where I didn’t even remember I read it until I found it on my list of books I’d read in 2011. I also apparently rated it 3 stars on Goodreads, and I wish I’d written a review because I’m curious what I thought about it ten years ago.

My rating this time around is going to be 2.5 (because I use The StoryGraph and it lets me do half stars). I can see why this book became a classic, but it is so, so boring.

The main plot in this story is Guy, the protagonist, is a fireman whose job is to burn books because owning books is illegal. He meets a teenage girl who lives next door and is weird because she likes to think and it gets him to think (and I was very, very relieved that the book did not go the 30-year-old man starts a relationship with a 16-year-old girl route because it felt like things were headed that direction for a while). He saves a Bible from a house that he burned, reads it, and absolutely loses his mind that books say things. Then he torpedoes his entire life because he doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that he read a book.

I mainly was frustrated with him because he just could not keep his cool. Perhaps that’s just because I’m very good at acting normal even when my emotions are a disaster, but I couldn’t relate to or understand his inability to keep his mouth shut. Being found possessing books means you’re arrested and your house is burned to the ground, yet Guy could not stop showing his illegal books to everyone. Like, for heaven’s sake, dude, how are you so incapable of just not telling everybody you’re breaking the law?

This book does have some poignant things to say, which is probably why it became a classic. One of the main themes is how modern people don’t want to think for themselves or have to consider any moral grey areas, they want to be told the right opinions to have and be consuming mindless entertainment constantly – which is a tendency I’ve noticed in my own life, despite the fact that I also adore books. The other themes, though, seem to be “Guy is an idiot” and “the old classic books are infinitely valuable.”

Which brings me to an interesting theme of all three classic dystopian books I’ve read (Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World) – they’re all worshiping at the feet of the old classics of the Western canon. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most subtle (with the protagonist simply part of the government office that rewrites the classics to fit the Party’s platform), but all three seem to have this belief that this canon of classic books is of infinite worth, society knowing the classics will prevent all tyranny, and it is worth dying to preserve them. Which is wildly bizarre to me. I deeply love a great many books, but I don’t think any book is so valuable that it is worth preserving at the cost of human life. And having four years of high school English where everyone is forcibly exposed to Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have fixed anything about American society.

Although the protagonists are the special ones who comprehend the great ideas behind the worshiped Old Classics, so maybe the moral is actually that the common folk just need to let the intellectual elite be in charge and that will solve all our problems. Either way, it’s not a moral I particularly agree with.

I get why Fahrenheit 451 became a classic, because it does have one good thing to say and its dystopian society was a new idea when it was published. But the only plot is Guy not being able to handle that he read part of a book, and that’s not much of a plot at all. The descriptions were also on the excessive side and several times I forgot what was being described before the description finished. In my opinion, not worth the read.

Review: Siddhartha

Title: Siddhartha

Author: Hermann Hesse

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Animal death, misogyny (mention), self-harm by denial of physical needs, sexual content, suicidal ideation

Back Cover:

Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922.

Review:

I originally thought this was a fictionalized biography of the Buddha, and was very confused when the titular Siddhartha’s journey didn’t line up with what I knew of the Buddha Siddhartha’s story. But the protagonist of this story is a completely different character who just happens to have the same name.

There is no real plot in this book, unless you count the kind-of character arc of Siddhartha searching for enlightenment. He becomes an aescetic and masters all those teachings and he meets the Buddha and recognizes the wisdom in his teachings but chooses not to become a disciple (this is where I looked at the Wikipedia article for this book and discovered I was not in fact reading a fictionalized biography of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha), and does a bunch of other stuff on his journey to become enlightened.

This may be my modern sensibilities talking, a strange choice by the translator (this book was originally written in German), or the 1920s having a very different way of expressing friendship, but I choose to believe this book is queerer than it seems on the surface. Siddhartha’s best friend Govinda is obviously completely in love with Siddhartha, with several paragraphs talking about how much Govinda loves every aspect of Siddhartha’s face and body and personality, and it must have been at least somewhat reciprocated because they call each other “my dear.” Siddhartha did have a female lover, but he later moved in with a man and at one point they raise a child (Siddhartha’s with his female lover) together. There’s nothing explicitly queer anywhere, but I don’t think the subtext is exactly subtle.

This book is best understood when you have the context of Hermann Hesse’s life. Hermann was very depressed, didn’t fit into the bourgeois society he grew up in, and couldn’t find meaning in having fun and being rich like his peers did, so he went to India to try and find enlightenment in Eastern philosophy. He didn’t find it, so he wrote a novel where the protagonist has the enlightenment experience he wishes he had. (And Hermann himself being not into women would explain why he couldn’t seem to stay interested in any of his wives – although considering this book and that his Wikipedia page hints nothing about him being gay, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were asexual and romantically interested in men but his strict religious upbringing meant he was never comfortable acting on anything.) This is all speculation, of course, but I think it explains a lot.

Much of the philosophy in this book is obscure bordering on incomprehensible. From reading Hermann’s Wikipedia page his personal philosophy was that each person has to find their own individual path to god, and that seems to be the moral of Siddhartha (just replace “god” with “enlightenment”). This book’s redeeming quality is that it’s less than 100 pages long. If this were a longer book I probably wouldn’t have finished it, but since it’s so short it didn’t drag too much. And even though the philosophy came off as esoteric and unclear, it did end up being a cute little story.

Review: The Bell Jar (DNF)

Title: The Bell Jar

Author: Sylvia Plath

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Physical abuse, sexual assault/attempted rape, vomit, excrement, drug use, alcohol use

Read To: 48%

Back Cover:

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

Review:

I didn’t know anything about this book going in, other than it was considered a classic and the author committed suicide. I picked it up mainly because it was a classic and it was immediately available at the library when I needed something to read to finish out the workday.

It really wasn’t horrible. I read nearly half of it. It was slow and entirely lacking an overarching plot, but there were enough things that happened that it didn’t feel unreadably boring. (Of course, most of those things happening were negative things and Esther making decisions that I absolutely would not have made, but book characters aren’t required to make the same decisions as me I guess.) There definitely was a distinct feeling of Esther having severe depression, but I didn’t really get any of the “losing her mind” aspect of it, even nearly halfway through.

Though I wouldn’t call it boring, it wasn’t exactly engaging either, and when I got to work the next day I decided to try something else before coming back to this. And then I read two books in a row (The Never Tilting World and Vita Nostra) that did “character descending into madness” so much better than The Bell Jar does, I couldn’t find any desire to pick this one up again. It’s not really a bad book, all things considered. It’s just not to my personal taste and I found it not engaging enough to bother finishing.